I was deep in meditation. I asked, "Is there a plan for my life? What is the plan!?" I heard a voice say "It's in the key of B", and I saw the symbol for a flat in musical notation. The plan for my life is in the key of B flat! I understood this immediately. I have a record of Pete Fountain playing the clarinet. It's a clarinet tuned to the key of B flat. I like to improvise on my guitar along with the record. The plan for my life is: "We're improvising!".

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Saturday, January 9, 2016

The political polarization in the US is caused by journalists and politicians who are misleading the public. Research by sociologist Jonathan Haidt shows that all people throughout the world have the same five basic intuitions about morality. The differences between liberals and conservatives occur in slight preferences about which aspects of morality they think are most important. Liberals and conservatives have much more in common than they have differences. However, journalists and politicians gain personally by demonizing and dehumanizing people who disagree with them when they portray these differences as a matter of smart vs. stupid or good vs. evil. This is a scam. This hate mongering makes it harder to find solutions to problems because it leads discussions to rapidly degenerate into name calling and vilification. It breeds mistrust and keeps us fighting among ourselves which makes us susceptible to exploitation by demagogues and moneyed interests1. Good, intelligent people can disagree3. Every scientific controversy shows that the interpretation of facts is only an opinion. If people will stop being fooled by this deception, the hate mongers will become powerless and our society will be able to solve problems through civil discussions based on mutual understanding and respect. The politicians are not going to solve this problem until it is in their interest to do so. We the people have to come together ourselves and reject media sources and political candidates that persist in dividing and polarizing the country. As Milton Friedman said, we the people need to make it politically profitable for the politicians to do the right thing2.

Jonathan Haidt is a sociologist who studies morality and ethics. In the two videos below, he discusses his research which explains why liberals and conservatives should be able to come together in a positive, cooperative, working relationship instead of their current antagonistic mode of interaction.

Haidt's research identifies five intuitions about morality that people of all cultures recognize. Each moral factor is beneficial in certain situations. Haidt has found that that conservatives and liberals in the US have different opinions about which moral factors are most important and this minor difference is the essence of what differentiates conservatives and liberals.

Haidt himself is a liberal who has come to appreciate the good qualities in conservatism. He likens the relationship between conservatism and liberalism as like yin/yang. Both are a necessary part of the whole of humanity. This is a much more accurate and healthy way of viewing the relationship between the two outlooks than the antagonistic approach many people (particularly journalists and politicians) have. Haidt explains political differences not in terms of smart vs. stupid or good vs. evil but in terms of inborn traits and neither outlook is better or worse in its consequences. A society with both liberals and conservatives will be superior than a society of only liberals or only conservatives.

One of Haidt's interests is the political deadlock and polarization in the current US government. The implications of his research are that in the legislative assemblies in the US, legislators of each party should understand the positive contributions both liberalism and conservatism make to society and they should work together with mutual respect using this knowledge rather than taking an adversarial approach that the other side is stupid or evil. By understanding the different aspects of morality and which situations each is appropriate in, legislation and amendments can be justified on moral grounds - providing a rational, respectful, basis for discussion and compromise.

Electoral politics and commercial journalism seem to me to be a huge obstacle to this vision. Haidt thinks holding open primaries is a good way to improve the situation. I think it would be also be helpful if the political candidates and journalists understood this research and talked publicly about it so that it becomes part of our culture.

Notes

Part of the problem we have solving problems in society is understanding what the actual facts are. Frequently, moneyed interests use media and internet savvy to create a false reality that fools most people including politicians, doctors and scientists who then spread the misinformation. Because of the acrimony caused by political polarization in society, it is very difficult for people to sort through these deceptions because attempts at civil discussions about the facts quickly descend into accusations of the stupidity and evil of those who disagree.

This TEDx by Sharyl Attkisson explains how these false realities are created:

In this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages.

The talk includes a discussion of how Wikipedia (3:57) has been complicit in the problem. Wikipedia contradicted medical research 90% of the time (5:31).

Attkisson suggests how to recognize propaganda and astroturf (at 8:55):

"Astroturfers often claim to debunk myths that aren't myths at all. Use of the charged language tests well, people hear that something's a myth maybe they find it on snopes... and they instantly declare themselves too smart to fall for it. But what if the whole notion of the myth is itself a myth and you and snopes fell for that."

"Beware when interests attack an issue by controversializing or attacking the people, personalities and organizations surrounding it rather than addressing the facts."

"Astroturfers tend to reserve all of their public skepticism for those exposing wrong doing rather than the wrong doers. In other words, instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority."

These videos explain how some people manipulate the media to generate false news stories. False news stories are used to induce opponents to react in ways that make them look bad and make supporters more emotionally involved in the cause. The author, Ryan Holiday, expresses his political views which I am not endorsing, but both sides use these techniques and these videos and the link do a good job of explaining how they work.

No we don't need to change congress. Excuse me. People have a great misunderstanding about this. People in congress are in a business. They're trying to buy votes. They're in the business of competing with one another to get elected. The same congressman will vote for a different thing if he thinks that's politically profitable. You don't have to change congress. People have a great misconception in this way. They think the way you solve things is by electing the right people. It's nice to elect the right people but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.

Here are a couple of examples of how people can have different interests without either being stupid or evil:

Globalists think it is unfair that national borders keep people from fleeing war zones and prevent them from living where there is economic opportunity. Nationalists think national borders are needed to keep terrorists out, to prevent drug trafficking and human trafficking, and to prevent lower wage workers from displacing them in the work force or lowering wages.

High earners may often favor environmentalism and government regulation over economic growth because they don't suffer when the national economy performs poorly. However, for low earners, economic policy is not theoretical or philosophical, economic growth can mean the difference between having enough food for their children or not.

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Followers

Eminent Researchers

Charles Darwin: ... I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.

Kurt Gödel: Materialism is false. ... The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived. ... The brain is a computing machine connected with a spirit. ... I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner. In fact, it is disprovable. ... Mind is separate from matter. ... There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.

Alan Turing: I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

Max Planck (Nobel Prize for Physics): I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Erwin Schrödinger (Nobel Prize for Physics): Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize for Physics): On the other hand, however, every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble

...

I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Brian D. Josephson (Nobel Prize for Physics): What are the implications for science of the fact that psychic functioning appears to be a real effect? These phenomena seem mysterious, but no more mysterious perhaps than strange phenomena of the past which science has now happily incorporated within its scope.

Charles Robert Richet (Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine): 1. There is in us a faculty of cognition that differs radically from the usual sensorial faculties (Cryptesthesia). 2. There are, even in full light, movements of objects without contact (Telekinesis). 3. Hands, bodies, and objects seem to take shape in their entirety from a cloud and take all the semblance of life (Ectoplasms). 4. There occur premonitions that can be explained neither by chance nor perspicacity, and are sometimes verified in minute detail. Such are my firm and explicit conclusions.

Pierre Curie (Nobel Prize for Physics): It was very interesting, and really the phenomena that we saw appeared inexplicable as trickery—tables raised from all four legs, movement of objects from a distance, hands that pinch or caress you, luminous apparitions. All in a [setting] prepared by us with a small number of spectators all known to us and without a possible accomplice. The only trick possible is that which could result from an extraordinary facility of the medium as a magician. But how do you explain the phenomena when one is holding her hands and feet and when the light is sufficient so that one can see everything that happens?

Sir John Eccles (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine): I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.